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Adam DrakeIt’s a bit late, but last year during the Christmas break, Kaggle had a very interesting competition for the season. The story was that the toy list at Santa’s workshop was long, and elves had to make all the toys, with some constraints on their productivity rating and rest intervals. This is an adaptation of the classic problem of minimizing makespan, though with additional constraints. A good leaderboard position could be achieved using offline methods since the entire list of toys was supplied in advance, but as usual I pursued online solutions for fun and speed.
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read more Adam DrakeMany technology companies can be viewed in the context of a two-sided marketplace (TSM), a special case of a multi-sided marketplace (MSM). This view has interesting implications for the dynamics of the business in addition to how product strategy and prioritization is decided. Having worked for over 15 years in TSM environments from Online Travel, to Affiliate Marketing at Zanox, mobile ad network madvertise, and many years in Financial Services, I thought it might be useful to provide a conceptual overview of the markets, dynamics, and implications.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction In the previous post on the Kardashev scale for data organizations we discussed the three general types and their characteristics, but didn’t dive deeply into how to make the move from Type 2 to Type 3 (the move from Type 1 to Type 2 doesn’t really require much explanation).
The move from Type 2 to Type 3 requires more focus on data and how it integrates into the product (including developing totally new products) and a departure from focusing on the data organization as a service unit.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction Over the last few years, some people have come to see schemas of any type as a legacy hinderance which should generally be ignored, and much of the NoSQL fervor that gained momentum around 2010 was related to this. The promise was that not having schemas would set you free and that you would become more productive, agile, your application would be faster, and all kinds of other things.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction For those who have read or seen much science fiction, you have probably encountered the Kardashev Scale at some point. This is a general grouping of how advanced a civilization is based on the ways it utilizes energy. At the risk of reiterating what’s already on Wikipedia:
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to utilize.
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